Chapter 48: Revolution!
Everyday going forward, Aaren and Jared seek to dreamslip. They move in together and begin to construct as normal a life as two can who care not for the normal but for the “moving beyond.” Truly, they sense that there is still something “beyond” the Warrior culture’s vision. Still young at heart, they seek the elusive Revolution! They are still committed to making something happen to change a world that is so insane that it is endlessly at war—finding enemies both Outside and Inside.
They’re more than prepared to throw out the political and theological baggage— Violence/nonviolence. Sin/Redemption. “The war still on, isn’t it?”—mainly because they’ve used these words and they just don’t work. Try as they may, Christian or Marxist or Democratic or Western terms keep them trapped and they don’t want to be trapped. At the base, all the visions they’ve ever heard about—whether from the East or the West—still hold that someone is the enemy. Someone is to be violently hurt, tortured, murdered “in the name of …!”
All Aaren and Jared can figure is that it’s up to them, that the Revolution must be something that rises from within their personal quests to go in the opposite direction, move beyond where they can live as if they are no one’s enemy. Where to begin? “Let’s begin to build a life together, Sweetheart.”
She finishes off her Masters. He returns to graduate school to work on his doctorate in history. He wants to tell not just his-story or her-story, rather, humankind’s story. Our story. She works organizing and directing a small network of pre-schools. “Rich, poor, black and white—kids!”
They move into a rented house in South Minneapolis on a street “as near to a lake as we can get!” From all external observation Jared is “adjusting” or as his parole officer writes “being rehabilitated.” There are moments when they laugh at themselves with more piercing jabs. “Burned-out hippie weirdo Revolutionaries making sponge cake!” They are aware that even some close friends cannot let them let go of their past personal stories. At times, they over-hear a derisive “becoming so Middle Class” or “Establishment” or “They’ve sold out!”
It’s true, they know. They have moved beyond the Warrior story that—as they’ve come to experience—includes the Resistance and the Church and the American Way. They focus on developing a Beloved’s story, one that rises from their heartfelt intimacy, not from some mental analysis or revealed truth. For them “the personal is political” means that “the personal is sacred” and that “the personal is the creating, godding force.”
Godding: A word of heresy. Sacrilege. At first they like it because it steals the word “God” that’s been used to separate people from one another. “My God.” “Our God.” “Not your God.” They take it and use it in a most profane manner.
Aaren: “For me godding is a bridge word. See the supposedly great claim is that God became human, but the reverse is true. The human gives rise to the presence of God. From within you rises a male god, from within me a female goddess. Lower case “g” because it is a common word, describing the most obvious human fact that we become fully human when we embrace one another.”
Jared: “Right! There’s heat in that embrace. Feral, lustful, forging, fierce heat! You forge me, Sweet A, make me feel I’m fully me when I’ve been with you as a we.”
But soon the word—“More tortured theological babble!”— makes them stumble, so they cross the bridge it provides and drop it. Once crossed Jared states, “Let’s just throw out all references to spiritual or religious or holy or sacred or profane or political or whatever ideological jargon, imagery, analysis, et cetera, et cetera, that still pollutes our brains!”
“You know if those words, those images made me wet, made my cunt run, maybe then I’d say okay. But they don’t. I’m with you. Let’s just chuck all that crapola!”
He playfully mocks himself. “Hey, I studied all that theology for nothing?”
“Theology?” she presses her hands to her breasts, places fingers on her pussy.
“Fuck, lady, I was told you are the problem. I didn’t get no words or images or anything for you or about you that makes you holy or divine.”
Chucking the past as best they can, they trust that they will discover what is “beyond the Warrior” as they live fully and move into the future building a life together. They return to the root experience of being human—that of the heartfelt embrace. They do so because through their honest and painful discussions about her Wargasm and his dreams, especially “Aaren’s fantasy,” they understand that this how the Warrior’s myth begins.
“Isn’t this perverse? It begins without a heartfelt embrace. What does the Warrior want women to hear when Eve is told there is no Mother Goddess but that she was not born rather created, worse, molded from Adam’s bodily part, the Rib?”
“Babe, you just don’t know how sick! I mean, fucking-A, they don’t say it straight out but the cock is all. It’s all the Warrior’s got. It’s all that Adam has. Jesus too. Cock and no cunny. It’s really wacko stuff once you think it through, I mean, they want males to believe that they are it all—Mother and Father, God and Goddess. Man, that the male body is the birthing body. Jeeeesssssuuuuuusssss! It’s more than a bit psycho when you step back and look it.”
In a moment of pure amazement, they realize that it is just this simple act of heartfelt embracing that is the revolutionary act. Heartfelt embracing is the act that stands everything the Warrior believes on its head. Heartfelt embracing is the act that puts flesh on their mantra, “Love as if you are no one’s enemy.”
It’s true, the Beatles got it! “Remember, to let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better.”
“Is it that stupid, really, I mean? You mocked the priests all gaily robed for Mass, called them men in girl’s dresses but I never gave it much thought. But now, maybe. They are a bunch of sickos, aren’t they?”
She knows this—that her body is now the inspiration for the language of the Beloved. He must learn to read her, hear her revelations. Then they will talk as inspired Beloveds. More, every girl, every woman, broad and cunt will come to proclaim, “We are the fullness of life! Come into me and live!’”
Revolution: What is it? What do they do? What do they seek? It’s amazingly hard work, daunting to try and create a new mythic moment, but it all begins as the Warrior story also begins—as he looks at her. They know that they have woken every previous day of their lives to that Warrior dream: “So the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs.” This dream wherein the male exists before the female, where Eve is molded from Adam’s body and that heralds that the male body is the birthing body—mythic theft!— they rise and counter as they touch one another, “I am my body. You are my body. We are our body.”
The Warrior male only dreams her as being derivative. He does not celebrate her as the birthing egg or her monthly moon blood as a sign of life’s everlasting vitality. For she is not a goddess, never, her embrace is a temptation to fall from grace. Coupling with her is for reproduction—Sons! Heirs!— not a moment of ecstasy.
As Eve and the Mother Goddess were rendered invisible and the presence and power of the feminine obliterated, so now the first Revolutionary act is for him to look at her, see her and make her fully present by recognizing her using every sense: see, smell, taste, feel, hear. And she to him. Together they attend to one another. Declare their intention to be together. Celebrate!
An average day: All dressed, ready to leave for work, he muffles a laugh as he kids her, “So it comes down to this—fuck me and leave me!”
“Listen,” she walks across the room, pinches his earlobes and pulls him down so as to snare his eyes. He does not resist. “I want to be here.”
As she affirms it, he knows it as another form of mantra. He responds, eyes tightly fixed on her, leaking his soul love, “I also want to be here.”
With this said, they begin another day with an act of intention.
Intention. They talk: “Not something romantic like bubbly ooze. Not something bug-eyed and stupid. More like awareness. That you are my body and I am yours.”
Each day they begin by becoming aware, taking some moments for their private waking and approach one another and touch drawing one another into the coupled body they become together. “Celebrate!” becomes a phrase that opens them to dreamslipping and starts them countering the erotically violent Warrior dream. “Let us become one couple who is not waking to the Warrior dream.”
This Warrior dream rises every day to divert and block their dreamslipping. Fiercely committed to the Revolution, Aaren and Jared engage their erotic fire, embrace and consciously intend their coupling to be a first act of a new mythic story, that of the Beloveds who embrace and behold one another as cherished lovers.
Dreamslipping is a rigorous venture. For as they dreamslip, they encounter many Warrior stories that they must bring to full light so as to defuse their dark powers. It’s a time of great inner struggle, a time of risk—“I’ve betrayed you,” opens his account of “Aaren’s fantasy.” As happens, she responds dramatically differently than anticipated. “My, my, you’re at least half right!” she laughs at him. Not forgiving but having mercy. “I also wanted to fuck their wives and girlfriends!”
Then, they confront the many political stories that so heavily impacted their lives. At such times they seek forgiveness for others, as when they dreamslip to a village called Mylai.
“A. Told him if he couldn’t move the people to waste them, sir.”
“A. To waste or destroy the enemy, sir. To go into the area and destroy the enemy that were designated and that is it. I went into the area to destroy the enemy, sir. I never sat down to analyze it, men, women and children. They were the enemy and just people.”
.......
“Mylai Four! You had a woman down on her knees, didn’t you. And you threatened her baby.”
“No.”
“You opened your pants and you told her to give you a blow job ...”
“I object!” …
“and Lieutenant Calley stopped you. Didn’t he?”
Dreamslipping is indeed a rigorous, dangerous venture. Nothing is without risk. Demons pop out of nowhere, so it seems. Stories bring tears, recriminations, deep sorrows. Quite often, the darkness resists the light.
“Quinn. Honey, I need to tell you about Quinn …and about Marion…”
“Go on, it’s okay. Anything. Tell me everything.”
Just a piece of shit! “I can’t. I want to. I just can’t.”
She holds him. Tenderly caresses his forehead. Whispers, “Later. We’ll get to that, later.”
Adam and Eve, Lieutenant Calley at Mylai, and Quinns from all ages continue to wage their wars—everyday, relentlessly. Equally so have Jared and Aaren begun to live as Revolutionaries and daily engage in their radical practice of intimately coupling with intention as they dreamslip anew and so make present one another as Beloveds—creating themselves as Earthfolk who “love as if you are no one’s enemy.”
Practice. She tidies the bed and he puts on some music, a long, endlessly looping play of Mozart and Beethoven and Bach on a daisy chain with Clapton’s “Layla,” Moody Blues’ “The Far Side of the Moon,” and some dark, sweltering fantasies of Santana. She lights several candles, he opens and burns a fragranced incense stick. The candles cast flickering shadows.
“I am not your enemy. I am your dreamer. I want to be here.” She in front, sitting within his legs, and he long arms down hers hanging down onto her thighs and they breathe together, slowing to sense the other and working to be in tandem, their natural rhythms on different cycles to serve the needs of their quite different bodies, in a hush they reach it, in and out, breaths breathing a common breath, allowing their full body to feel the other, belly to back, legs nudging legs, thighs of his encompassing hers and half her calves, and over her he drapes his head, placing it astride her right temple, his chin is almost her cap, and they move ever so imperceptibly on the whispers of flesh that they have come to hear and allow to speak, the smallish call of skin to skin, “Touch me! Feel me!” and his nipples harden as his hands cup hers, and she is soft, and he presses her, binding her inside his palms and his lips find her ears and he nips her, pulling softly, gathering her cheek within a slight suck, he’s breathing her into him, she is falling back as if picked up by a strong gust and she releases into the fall and around her she hears the invitation, “Come! Let us celebrate, my Beloved!”
He holds her gently, lifts her up under her arms, not pinching nor hurting, and in one motion turns and places her upon his cock, calmly and assuredly—they are totem, Sky and Earth, Air and Water, conjunctio oppositorum: one coupling as two and shuddering freshly becoming the new one of we.
Embraced, they work to dreamslip. Their motion together is a gentle rocking and they search for each other in this calm before the storm, that period of heightened sensitivity, of alertness, for it is their storm that is forming, their deepest yearnings…inside her he submerges, swimming as they breathe, stroke and breathe, and she offers herself as water, ocean, pool and lake, calling to her lover, “Swim! Swim over here!”… they share “I love you!” “You are my beloved!” over and again until it fades into a faint echo...it is quiet, only the wind of their breathing, they are unaware of the room and the candlelight playing and the dying stalk of incense and the savory delights of Mozart, they are strolling together along the beach, disappearing into a sunset and returning upon sea gull wings, rising from a burial of sand, playfully scampering after each other and tossing themselves into the sea ... they swim and she is porpoise and he seal, blustering lion seal, they sound the song of the sea, catching their play among seaweed they rise and frolic themselves as cloud and breeze, forming and unforming in shapes, some monstrous, some silly ... falling but emerging into each other’s arms, they feel the hot sun rise and the delightful shout of the moon in response... they are face to face, she straddling him, he undulating her, fused within his thighs, a blessing of his prodigious length, he is rocking chair to her, her softness the rider on his stride and roll ... they settle into this wave of motion, like an egg attempting to stand on its end, a bit of a wobble, he and she embrace in the small of their bodies, becoming as one cell in the their fuller coupled body, he sperm, she egg, they as one are yoked and yolk, and within this coupled body bursts that moment of creation—“Flash!”—that stroke and slide, that tap on the door and the wondrous moment of opening: the entry, the rise, the Up The Lights, the Rolling Away of the Stone ... they are blessed this moment as One in the Other, that coming of themselves which is future and will be past and present, their child, so it begins, they dreamslipping, he and she, Jared and Aaren chanting sweetly, hearts afire.
I love you.
I am not your enemy.
I want to be here.
I am your dreamer.
Aaren and Jared: Beloveds.